Sukie Baxter | Seattle Rolfing Therapy

Rolfing Therapy is traditionally structured in ten sessions, and for good reason. Pain is rarely located in only one area of the body. Though it might be your shoulder that hurts, your shoulder is connected to the rest of your body, and something in your posture or movement is causing you to move your shoulder in a way that causes pain.

Therefore, Rolfing consists of ten sessions. The Rolfing ten series sessions build one on top of another, so the work done in session one lays the groundwork for session two, and so on. This is how Rolfing addresses the body holistically instead of just chasing the symptoms of pain around and around.

But what happens when you finish your Rolfing ten series? Do you never get another Rolfing session? Or do you continue to get Rolfing every other week until the end of time?

Fortunately, neither is the optimal scenario. In most cases, the Rolfing ten series will create dramatic shifts in posture and movement and you will feel much more flexible as well as being pain-free. However, we are human and we live in a world that is constantly changing and putting demands on our body.

Stress and poor living habits (like having a desk job that forces you to sit most of the day or doing repetitive motion tasks like typing) as well as sports injuries and athletic training are continually shaping our bodies. Most people find that “tune ups” are beneficial in maintaining the results of their ten series.

I strongly recommend seeing a Rolfer at least once a year for a mini three-series of Rolfing sessions to keep you in optimal alignment. People are constantly changing; the notion of static posture is a myth. You want to be sure your body is changing for the better and not for the worse.

Athletes and people who play hard – that means you, weekend warriors! – need more frequent work because training puts a lot of stress on the joints and soft tissue. The smallest movement compensation can become magnified and result in injury with so much stress on the body.

Rolfing is a type of manual postural therapy and movement rehabilitation that works specifically with the fascial system with in the body. Fascia, also called connective tissue, covers every muscle, organ, nerve and bone in the human body and is entirely connected in a web-like structure, right down to the cellular level.

Dr. Ida P. Rolf, PhD, developed her work in the 1960s, calling it structural integration. It was nicknamed “Rolfing,” by her students. Dr. Rolf, a biochemist, noticed that fascia, the white, gunky tissue that most anatomists called packing material, assuming it simply filled in extra space in the body, had a plastic quality to it, much like a plastic grocery bag. If you place your thumb in a plastic bag and stretch it out, the imprint stays there, whereas if you stretch a rubber band, it returns to its original shape as soon as you let go (this is more of an elastic quality).

Rolfing works specifically within the fascial network. Since fascia is entirely connected throughout the body, a snag in one area due to injury, trauma or bad posture can cause a snag that pulls the whole body out of alignment, much the way a snag in a knit sweater can cause the entire garment to become misshapen if you pull on it. Therefore, Rolfing treats the whole body instead of just looking at symptoms because all postural dysfunction is interrelated.

Rolfing brings the skeleton back into alignment, not by working with bones but by working with all of the things that pull on the bones. Think of an old fashioned tent with ropes and wooden pegs that have to be pounded into the ground…if you pull really hard on one rope, the tent will be lopsided, right?

The same is true in your body. If one of the “ropes,” or lines of fascial tension, is too tight, it will pull the bones to which it attaches out of alignment. When your body is crooked, it takes a lot of muscle tension and energy to hold it upright, resulting in physical pain and fatigue.

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